pitt&sherry report on data centre efficiencies makes the national media

(28 June, 2012)

pitt&sherry appeared in the national media this week with a piece titled Heat on Data Centre Operators Over Energy (Andrew Colley – The Australian, June 26, 2012).

The article is based partially on a report written in 2009 by pitt&sherry’s Tony Marker and Peter Johnson, titled - Data Centre Energy Efficiency Product Profile. It was commissioned by the Equipment Energy Efficiency Committee (E3), convened by the then NSW Department of the Environment, Water, Heritage, and the Arts.
 
The article states that “a new energy rating system could increase pressure on Australian data centre operators to ensure their green credentials are up to scratch.”

This follows the approval by the Federal Department of Climate Change and Energy for the National Australian Built Environment Rating System (NABERS) to include data centres.

Managed by the NSW Office of Environment and Heritage, current ratings, which now include data centres, also provides separate ratings for:

• Office building, covering the environmental impacts of the activities and services traditionally supplied by, or within the control of, the landlords/operators of office buildings
• Office tenancy, covering the environmental impacts of the activities that are under the control of office occupants
• Hotels, rating are available for AAA-rated business hotels
• Shopping centres over 15,000 sqm
• Homes, covering all situations where the home carries all of its own services and land as a single identifiable package

Ratings are also in development for hospitals, schools and data centres.

The importance of such a tool is apparent when reading in the report that data centres represent an already large and rapidly growing energy consumption sector of the Australian economy, and are a significant source of CO2 emissions.

“The digital economy is growing at a faster pace than the overall economy and this will result in an increasing reliance of economic growth on the myriad of operations in data centres. Against this background, it will be necessary in a carbon-constrained future to deliver the services of data centres at the lowest economic and environmental cost. The electricity consumption and emissions associated with data centres are already of the same order of magnitude as major appliance groups subject to minimum energy performance standards and labelling (and exceed those of other white goods subject to labelling),” the report states.

NABERS has designed the energy performance-rating tool specifically for data centres, and is expected to be available by the end of the year.

Its development follows estimates in the pitt&sherry report that data centre electricity consumption in Australia would soon reach about 5 billion kilowatt hours per annum.

NABERS intends to gather benchmarking information from data centres around Australia before releasing the tool for data centres. Server computing and cooling equipment improvements are crucial to improving efficiencies at data centres, according to the report prepared by pitt&sherry.

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